The Abhorrent Rays

::: subchapter [04:50]{.timebreak .div} Serial Designation J needed a roadmap. Not literally --- her memory banks held a topologically mapped reconstruction of her surroundings. But figuratively? Where did she go from here? When would she fly back to the spire? The disassembly drone paced the parking lot of the Church of the Electric and the Divine. Metal and glass glimmered while her shadow danced and flickered faster than she moved, the bright fire still burning the church. Nearby, in a heat-slicked pile of snow, lay her squadmates. N was half-buried, his jacket taken off and lain beside him. V, meanwhile, leaned against the mound as if sitting. Sleep Mode shined upon each visor, though that indicator obscured their true state. J knew N's systems still busied themselves regenerating from the heat damage (whose fault was that? His.) In contrast, V systems threatened to cause heat damage, processors still spinning deep in memory consolidation routines J didn't have the means to terminate. Both of them were useless at the moment. So, where did J go from here? The faintest stars already were fading above the horizon. Less than an hour from now --- 05:49 --- the sun would rise. Unless they moved, they would die. [04:55]{.timebreak .div} J's pacing soon carried her several meters from the unconscious drones. Thoughts cycling through her processor, she drifted toward cooler air, farther from the burning church. She neared the edge of the lot. From behind, the entrance sign was blank. J glanced it, then in place of one eye a lightbulb icon flashed. The sign wasn't exactly a curtain, but this wasn't exactly powerpoint presentation; J just needed to get her thoughts out, look at them, evaluate them. Her left gauntlet transformed into a projector while J fiddled with her window manager's display options, then a map of the the local geography glowed on the blank sign's rear. Bright yellow projections rendered outlines of frozen rivers and snowcapped mountains. Sectors --- as defined by J --- comprised roughly the region corporate could expect a disassembly drone to cover in a single night, a circle formed around their base of operations: the spire. It would take a three hour flight to reach the edge. Time enough to go out, complete a mission, and return before the sun rose. Upon the projection, J outlined the perimeter of their sector with one thick line, encompassing hundreds of square kilometers. Within it stood one end of a mountain range; a (now frozen) lake surrounded by a dead forest; and the entirety of a city for which this was an outlying suburb. In the center, a star marked the spire, and a cute pictograph of a drone with pigtails indicated J's estimated current location. Visuals made it clear: tonight's mission hadn't taken them far. The church lay northeast of the spire, not even halfway to the perimeter. Why else would J have cut it so close? She wasn't careless. An hour's flight and J'd be back. Half that if she pushed extra speed. Judging by the time --- 04:57 --- she'd indeed have to push it, but returning safe to the spire tonight would be as simple as executing the command. Starting right now. Then J glanced to the snowpile behind her, yellow expression a glare surrounded by worry lines. Yes, J could make it back, but when would N and V wake up? ("You left N to overheat.") It wasn't J's fault N hadn't kept an eye on his own reserves. It wasn't J's fault seeing a dead drone --- of all things! --- deadlocked V's CPU. J had come first and done fine before N, before V. Of course she'd be the last, and she'd do just fine without them. Wait. J had come first? Where had that thought come from? They arrived on Copper-9 together, as a squad. She started to run a stack trace, but--- [05:00]{.timebreak .div} She didn't have time to run deep introspective scans, not now. I won't leave N and V to die, she decided. It'd be criminal neglect, for sure, unacceptable sabotage of company property. But the logistics were a nightmare, worse than tax season. How do you transport two sleeping disassembly drones halfway across a sector? Carrying was an option, sure --- disassemblers carried corpses back to the spire, after all. Sometimes entire cratefuls! But disassembly drones were heavy. Of all the special disassembly functions, flight consumed the most oil. Now that she's cooled down to the warm & clear, J operated with about 14 liters of oil --- flying back to the spire fast enough to beat the sun would guzzle 9 liters at minimum. Flying back in time carrying N and V? Simply impossible. J stopped pacing, and kicked the pavement hard enough to leave a crater. The damage to her peg leg healed half a second later. Could she hunt a drone? Her models shot down the possibility. Over the years, the number of worker drones remaining trended predictably down and their caution only grew more obnoxious. Could she find a drone, if she spiraled out for a few miles? Certainly. Would it save her any time? Absolutely not. J didn't want to let her squad die, but if she had to pick who survived... No. Her calculations were circling around a possibility, shutting it down preemptively. But if it was a matter of her squad's continued operation... J couldn't carry them back to the spire because she simply lacked the requisite oil, and she couldn't hunt a worker drone for fresh oil, and the nearest concentration of workers just went up in flames --- by V's own request. (Why did J listen?) Nevertheless, that didn't mean J had no sources of oil left. J turned around, and regarded V. The other female disassembly drone wasted plenty of oil in her hunts, but J knew V had shutdown more drones tonight than J. (It didn't mean V was more effective --- true effectiveness was delegation, intelligent management!) V had even began the night with more oil in the tank (as was necessary for her role in the formation). J walked forward. Purely in terms of volume, J stood before an oil mother lode. And the objective now was survival, with sunrise imminent. Every second counted. (05:01) Only one effective choice, right? J sat down, folding one leg over the other, and leaned closer to V. Limp against a mound of snow, her short hair wet, strands a mess, V sat statue-still. Earlier, beneath the church, J'd shunted her into sleep mode suddenly, and her mouth still lolled open, as if in persistent surprise. (Even unconscious, would J have ever dared look so undignified?) Some of V's repair nanites dripped out of her mouth. That crossed the line. J reached out wipe them away, then closed V's mouth for her. Then J caught herself. There were more important matters (05:02). Forced into sleep mode, processors hanging on inexplicably high priority threads, V wasn't waking up. Even from J's touch. Okay. J animated her eyes closing, and shut off her optics. Pretend it's a worker drone. J groped forward blindly, hands grasping onto warm plastic before she lunged forward, mouth agape. And J bit. Warm liquid surged forward, and J drank. Then she flinched back and spat out the oil mixture, retching even after her mouth emptied. Already, her plan melted to sludge. Forget drinking one mouthful of that, let alone enough to fill her tank. A clever design, really, J thought. Make disassembler oil unpalatable to consume, and even defective or compromised disassembly drones would have no option but to fulfill their purpose. As to be expected of the engineering genius of JCJenson..! But again, this was a matter of survival. Of continued operational capability! J said she wouldn't let her squad die, and if that meant enduring this wretched parasitism... J leaned forward to drink more, only to be stymied. The bite she'd taken out of V had already healed. Oh. This was bad. Not only would her regeneration be fighting J's efforts, that was itself a special disassembly function --- meaning V would be burning oil even as J tried to reallocate it. J transformed her hand. Combat options comprised to overwhelming majority of their transformation presets, but a few exceptions, utilities such as her projector, did exist. J produced a tool corporate had trained her to use, but not without lectures' worth of warnings. A clamp held a bright blue serial debugging cable. She released it and deftly unfolded the cord. Retransforming her hand, she touched V's neck, searched the surface under her head... There. Depressing the cover of a hatch on V's chest, it popped open, revealing a few ports. J kept her optics shut off, operating by feel. She took one end of the cord and missed the correct port a few times before the debugging cable clicked into place. Haptic sensors caught the unsteady thumping of V's core pulsing with oil, felt even from an inch away. Unconsciously, V curled toward J, hugging closer. J pushed her arms back with a huff, flush lines creeping onto her visor. Between that and the beating core, it reminded her of one of corporate's dictums. Never connect two cores online. A technician manipulating an active core was a foolish as an electrician handling a live wire. And J wasn't a technician; she was made of electricity. J pressed the button to kill power to V's core. With the solace of a rule followed, J popped open the hatch on her own neck, plugging the other end of the cable into herself. Still flushed, J looked away, attention instead directed toward an inner console. J began sending commands to V's operating system, housed in the motherboard rather than the core. [05:05]{.timebreak .div} After a false start, J was in, the lines of commands scrolled through standard output on her internal console. She paused there, and frowned. What was the invocation, again? It had been years since she had to configure her disassembly functions by hand, rather than a leaving a background process to manage it. A quick search through her memory brings up the name, an